This Week’s Events
Zach Hollander – Marcuse, King, Jr., and Davis: From Domination to a Politics of Emancipation
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 - 12 pm - 02 pm
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Marcuse, King, Jr., and Davis: From Domination to a Politics of Emancipation
Given the overwhelming sense of crisis across intersecting spheres of life—social, political, economic, ecological—why does it feel as though a politics of emancipation is an ever-elusive, if not naive or misguided, desire? How should we understand the possibility of transformative, emancipatory praxis in relation to structures of domination which also produce distinct effects at the level of our habits and psycho-social relations? This presentation will provide an outline of my dissertation research that stems from these questions and concerns. Specifically, I turn to three thinkers writing, acting in, and inspired by the political crises and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a historical period with clear yet non-straightforward resonances with today: Herbert Marcuse, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Angela Davis. All three, in different ways, are committed to a dual project of critique that not only provides diagnostic, critical insight into the drivers and mechanisms of domination within certain forms of life, but also orients subjects towards political action and questions of what can and should be done in the interest of emancipating ourselves. Taken together, I believe they provide crucial insights into the potentialities and difficulties of reorienting our socio-political practices against forms of domination.
► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.
Zach Hollander
Political Science
University of Toronto